Outsider Insight Quotes

Intelligent people need a fool to lead them. When the team's all a bunch of scientists, it is best to have a peasant lead the way. His way of thinking is different. It's easier to win if you have people seeing things from different perspectives.

A fresh pair of eyes can often find problems.

The guest will judge better of a feast than the cook

The stupidest person in the room might have the best idea.

Great Canadian comics are often outsiders and insiders at the same time. That's a great perspective for a comedian.

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.

It's insulting when somebody who is not a member of our community feels like they have a great understanding of what it's like to grow up gay in this country.

I tend to be a great optimist when it comes to the United States and the American way of life, I think precisely because I wasn't born into it.

I mistrust anyone... if they're saying, 'Well, that market wants this,' and you're not part of that market.

A stranger may easily detect what is strange to the oldest inhabitant, for the strange is his province.

I need to have one foot inside and one foot outside a culture to be able to write about it. For example, I couldn't write about the gay culture if I were wholly inside or outside of it. Finding that distance is always interesting. I jokingly say that when I'm in America, I write about Beirut, and when I'm in Beirut, I write about America. A lot of my friends in Beirut think I'm more American than Lebanese. Here, my friends think of me more as Lebanese.

Portland and Oregon draw a certain kind of person to it. The city has extraordinarily talented people and sometimes it takes an outsider to see that.

It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.

I'm mostly coming at the superhero legends as an outsider, I know them and I studied them but I didn't really grow up with them, but I think it allows me to sort of analyze them in a way that's kind of interesting.

A stander-by may sometimes, perhaps, see more of the game than he that plays it.

Sometimes you are valued more when you're away than when you are in your own country.

Often it's the people who know a place least well who write about it best because they see it fresh.